Monday, November 06, 2006

Leila Vintage Electronics

I moved to northern California a few years back and, because I didn't know anybody up here that played music, I sold my gigging amp. All I had left to play through was my "trusty" 1966 Fender Vibro Champ (8" speaker, 1 6V6, 1 5Y3, 2 12AX7's) which promptly died on me.

Since I wasn't about to buy a whole new amp for playing around the house, I decided that I would fix the little guy. After a few weeks of research, I ordered the parts, bought a soldering iron and quickly was the proud owner of a perfectly working vintage tube amp. I could not believe how much better the amp sounded after I overhauled it. It had become easily the best sounding amp that I ever owned.

I had to do more!

I began to buy broken amps off of eBay, fix them up and resell them. Among those were a 1959 Gibson GA-5T,
a 1958 Silvertone 1433,










a couple of Fender Musicmaster Bass amps,
















a Valco made Gretsh,

and a few more that I never photographed.

I then finally built my own amp from scratch. Once I did that, I found it very difficult to go back to cleaning out 50 year-old dust bunnies from vintage amps.